A Woman Among the Stars: Celebrating the Life and Career of Jeri Taylor

Jeri Taylor, scriptwriter and producer of many popular television shows, including Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager passed away on October 24, 2024 at the age of 86. Taylor was born in Bloomington, Indiana, graduated from IU with a Bachelor’s Degree in English in 1959, and donated her archive to the Lilly Library in the mid-1990s. Rebecca Baumann, Curator of Modern Books and avid Star Trek fan, celebrates Taylor’s legacy and shares highlights from Taylor’s remarkable collection at the Lilly Library.

When I began working at the Lilly Library, I was delighted to discover that we hold the archives of Jeri Taylor, as well as complete runs of scripts of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation (the latter donated by Taylor), and I had an opportunity to dig into the collection for a 2016 exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the show. I discovered not only a great deal of material to satisfy my nerdy need for Trekkie trivia but also learned more about the remarkable woman whose vision helped guide the latter days of ST: TNG and who was one of the primary forces in the development of Star Trek: Voyager. 

Taylor’s Pre-Trek Career

Jeri Taylor was a true Hoosier, born in Evansville, Indiana in 1938. She attended Indiana University Bloomington, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with honors in 1959 with an A.B. degree in English. She followed this with an M.A. in English from California State University-Northridge. Her career as a writer began with sports writing, and in the early 1970s she began writing television scripts for shows such as Little House on the Prairie, The Incredible Hulk, Magnum, P.I, Jake and the Fatman., and Quincy, M.E., serving also as producer and sometimes director on the latter two shows. The Lilly’s archive provides insight into Taylor’s early career, including scripts from television shows and made for TV movies that she wrote.

Taylor’s archive reveals her passion and attention to her work from the very beginning of her career. Among the treasures are several scripts for ABC After School Specials, including Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom, a 1981 made-for-television movie starring Patty Duke as an abusive mother and Sean Astin (later famous as Mikey in The Goonies and Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings) in his very first role. Taylor shows the pride she has in this early work by including a note in the archive reading “Nominated for an Emmy and a Writers’ Guild Award.

Taylor also tried her hand at directing episodes that she wrote, including the controversial episode of Quincy, M.E. “Quincy’s Wedding, Part 2.” Fans were not thrilled that their favorite cranky pathologist and playboy was settling down–and that his wife was insisting that he sell his beloved houseboat! The scripts for this episode in Taylor’s archive include extensive notes and sketches of scenes. Taylor also included a note that this second attempt at directing was her last–she much preferred the role of writer and, later, producer. She also saved clippings related to the show, including one on Quincy taking on gun violence. The “issue” television of the 1970s and 80s are a fruitful area of study as we continue to grapple with the same social problems in 21st century contexts.

Taylor’s Contributions to The Next Generation

Taylor joined the Star Trek: The Next Generation staff in 1990 as a writer and supervising producer at the beginning of the fourth season, just as the show was hitting its stride and becoming a major hit. Taylor’s writing credits on the show include a number of well-regarded and iconic episodes. With Kacey Aronold-Ince she co-wrote “Final Mission,” the episode that bid farewell to Wesley Crusher as a series regular and introduced the Cardassion Race. She wrote “Unification, Part I,” the episode that brought Leonard Nimoy’s Spock into the Next Generation storyline; “Suddenly Human,” in which Captain Picard becomes a father figure for a teenage boy raised in an alien culture; “Time’s Arrow, Part II,” the time travel episode that sent Picard and his crew back to 1893 San Francisco; and “Sub Rosa,” the infamously weird episode in which Dr. Beverly Crusher falls in love with a ghost in a lamp who was also haunting (and sleeping with) her grandmother. Taylor’s favorite episode that she wrote was season four’s “The Drumhead,” in which a retired rear admiral from Starfleet’s legal division is sent to investigate a suspicious explosion on the Enterprise and becomes convinced that nearly everyone on the ship is a traitor. In defense of himself and his crew, Captain Picard quotes the admiral’s father, a respected judge: “With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.” This quote reveals Taylor’s deep understanding of the philosophy behind Star Trek and its unwavering commitment to the values of exploration, curiosity, and freedom of speech and expression.

Along with the print scripts for The Next Generation, Taylor’s archive contains a wealth of material related to the seventh (and final) season of TNG. Included are drafts of scripts with Taylor’s comments, daily shooting schedules, technical consultations (tech experts were engaged to add “technobabble” to scripts so that the primary writers did not have to learn all the science) and memos from the agency which checked all episodes for series continuity, copyright infringement, and other possible errors.

Star Trek: Voyager and Kathryn Janeway

The Star Trek series on which Jeri Taylor unquestionably had the greatest impact was Star Trek: Voyager, which debuted in January of 1995. Trek was at a peak of popularity at this time. The Next Generation had just ended its seven-year run on television, the first film with the TNG cast, Star Trek: Generations, premiered in November of 1994, and Deep Space Nine had premiered a year earlier and was about to enter its second season. During the final season of TNG, Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor developed the concept of Voyager, a show taking the Trek franchise back to its roots of the exploration of unknown space. Taylor served as executive producer with Rick Berman for the show’s first four years. For the third and fourth seasons, she was also the showrunner (head of the writing staff), after which she retired, though she continued to work as a creative consultant for the show.

Because Taylor was so deeply involved in the creation of Voyager, the part of the Lilly Library’s archive related to the show are especially rich and provide fascinating insights into the development of the show and its characters. Taylor was especially central in developing the character of Kathryn Janeway, the first female captain to helm a major Trek franchise. Janeway’s backstory includes the detail that she was born in Bloomington, Indiana–no doubt a nod from Taylor to her alma mater. The archive reveals details about how much thought went into creating the character, even down to choosing the best name. The archive contains a memo from Jeri Taylor to Michael Piller and Rick Berman with a list of possible first names for Janeway. Katherine (spelled differently from the final form) is marked with a star, along with Caroline. The character seems to have been briefly named Elizabeth Janeway and the part was originally given to well-known French Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold, who quit after only two days of filming. The right name and the right actress finally came together when the part was turned over to Kate Mulgrew, who had more experience in episodic television shows and was better prepared for the rigorous filming schedule.

Materials from the archive also show the development that went into the character of Janeway’s First Officer, Commander Chakotay, the first Native American main character in a Star Trek franchise. The character has remained controversial for a number of reasons, including the fact that the actor portraying him, Robert Beltran, was not Native American himself, and also that Chakotay was originally given no official tribal affiliation (in the later series Star Trek: Prodigy, he was formally identified as being descended from the Nicarao people of Central America). The archive contains documents in which the producers, including Taylor, consulted with the Native Land Foundation to ensure that the character was portrayed in an accurate way. However, the primary consultant was falsely claiming Cherokee heritage, making much of the research behind the character suspect. In the documents given to Taylor and her co-producers, the consultant seems less concerned with the accurate depiction of Native Americans and more interested in the casting of the lead female role.

For Star Trek fans, Taylor’s archive is a fine rabbit hole indeed, providing insight into the scrupulous detail that went into writing and producing the show. Casting notes for many episodes are included, and we can see that Taylor watched thousands of actors audition, commenting on each one, to find the perfect fit for even the most minor non-recurring roles. Every name and cultural reference put into a script was examined by a third party for prior use or cultural context, and Taylor went through these and made changes when needed. She was proficient enough in “technobabble” to know when terms were used incorrectly and suggest alternatives.

On October 24, 2020, a statue of Kathryn Janeway was unveiled in Bloomington, Indiana, celebrating the town as the future birthplace of the great captain. The statue was commissioned by a group called the Janeway Collective, dedicated to preserving the ideas of Star Trek and the legacy of the character of Janeway and the women who brought her to life, Jeri Taylor and Kate Mulgrew.

A Queerly Personal Appreciation

I knew the name Jeri Taylor long before I knew the name of the Lilly Library. It flashed across my television screen throughout my teenage years as I obsessively watched reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation, falling deeper and deeper in love with its vision of post-scarcity space exploration, complex human-alien politics and relationships, and boundless joy at the very best of what humans are capable of thinking and doing. When Voyager premiered in 1995, I was sixteen years old and thrilled to finally see a woman–the intrepid Kathryn Janeway–in the captain’s chair of a starship, and Taylor’s name became more prominent as one of the new franchise’s creators and showrunners.

Taylor really came to my attention in 1998, with the publication of the Voyager novel Pathways (yes, I really am that nerdy–I spent my teen years devouring Star Trek novels), written by Taylor herself. As the show’s creator and showrunner, Taylor had special insight into the characters, and Pathways is one of the best of the hundreds of Trek novels out there, creating a science fiction version of the Civil War horrors of Andersonville Prison. But it was one little detail in the novel that struck me to the heart–there was clear mention of an openly gay character. He was a minor character–a former roommate of Harry Kim who during the novel forms a relationship with a male crewmate if I remember correctly after all these years–but it was powerfully important to me at the time because it confirmed what I knew in my heart all along–that of course queer people existed in the 23rd century, but that we were simply not allowed to see them on 20th-century television.

Star Trek has been deeply queer since its earliest days, giving birth to the greatest m/m romantic fandom of all time (Kirk/Spock “slash” fiction circulated in mimeographed zines at early Trek conventions), but despite the vision of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry to portray a sexually liberated future, network censors kept openly gay characters out of the television series until Star Trek: Discovery premiered in 2017. [1]

I believe that Jeri Taylor’s characters in Pathways may be the first openly gay characters to be depicted in officially-licensed Star Trek material. In the rare book world, we know that we must be very cautious about designating anything “the first.” But I throw this claim out into the world in the hopes that if earlier examples exist, someone will point them out. Certainly Taylor is on record advocating for gay representation in Voyager, which was repeatedly denied by her fellow showrunners and network executives. A 2020 article in The Guardian discusses the revelation in Star Trek: Picard that the beloved character Seven of Nine is queer:

“From the start, Seven’s sexuality was a source of controversy. A rumoured lesbian plot never came to pass. Voyager showrunner Jeri Taylor, who was committed to honouring Roddenberry’s promise, shared her frustration with TV Guide, saying: ‘It gradually became clear that this is a fight I could not win.’ In the end, the best Taylor could do was include a couple of brief gay moments in one of her licensed Trek novels. Meanwhile, fans took to the nascent internet forums, imagining a relationship between Seven and her on-screen mentor, Captain Janeway.”

I’m sure that Taylor never imagined that a dorky closeted queer teen who read and loved her novels would one day be one of the caretakers of her archives, but I hope that the idea would please her. Revisiting her archive and especially the scripts she wrote, I see Taylor’s generous vision of humanity–that we are all caretakers of each other and of the legacies that we leave behind. Taylor’s archive at the Lilly Library is only one small part of her far-reaching legacy, but one very worth preserving, studying, and sharing. If you would like to make an appointment to view Taylor’s papers, please contact our Reference team at liblilly@iu.edu.

[1]  No my fellow dorks–I have not forgotten Deep Space Nine, which is in fact my favorite Trek franchise and one of the queerest shows ever made in so many ways. Deep Space Nine was able to get away with so much because Voyager was considered the flagship franchise at the time, and thus DS9 avoided intense scrutiny as the “other” Trek show. And despite the fact that there is no heterosexual explanation for Garek, that DS9 included a significant f/f kiss scene, and that Dax is so obviously a transgender character, no character was ever officially designated as queer, either in the show itself or in the accompanying tie-in novels.